Casinos, card rooms, and other gaming establishments employ many dealers. The dealers shuffle cards, deal the cards, take bets, and otherwise play the game. Substantial amounts of the dealers' time is spent shuffling the decks of cards in preparation for the ensuing hands. During the time the dealer is shuffling, the game table is inactive and bets are not being placed. From the standpoint of the casino, it is desirable to minimize the time spent in preparing the decks of cards for additional play.
A number of prior art card deck shuffling machines have been invented. Most of the prior automatic shufflers have suffered from various problems. Many are relatively slow and do not help the basic problem encountered by the gaming establishment. Others are relatively complex and thus expensive to build and maintain.
Another problem area suffered by both manual and automated shuffling techniques is associated with having concentrated groupings of cards. These concentrations or “slugs” can occur with respect to cards having a value of 10 such as in playing blackjack. A skilled card-counting gambler can take advantage of such slugs to turn the odds against the casino and in favor of the card counter. Such slugs can also indicate the failure of prior art shufflers to effectively rearrange the order of cards in a deck or decks being shuffled.
Thus there remains a strong need for improved shuffling machines which can effectively reorder a deck or series of decks. Additionally, there remains a need for an improved automatic shuffler which is relatively easy to build, operate, and maintain.
In one shuffler of the prior art, U.S. Pat. No. 5,584,483, ejectors are mounted adjacent an unshuffled stack holder, which can be stationary or movable. Cards are ejected and discharged from the unshuffled stack at various random positions. The ejectors can be mounted on a movable carriage. Ejectors of this sort can be problematic because they can damage the card edges from impact and generate dust that can foul the internal workings of the apparatus unless it is consistently cleaned and maintained. Furthermore, the ejector apparatus does not fully deliver the card to the shuffled stack, so a variety of problems can happen with the delivery of the card. For example, sometimes the ejector can hit more than one card causing doubles or more to be delivered to the shuffled stack. Moreover, if two cards are stuck together for one reason or another, they often will not become separated upon impact of the ejector, causing doubles to be delivered to the shuffled stack.
In another shuffler of the prior art, U.S. Pat. No. 7,988,152, an unshuffled stack of cards sits on-edge and an exciter is adapted to impart vibrational action to the supported cards in the unshuffled stack. Cards drop in a random fashion by controlling the relative position of the cards over one or more card slots. These arrangements function well enough in terms of shuffling the cards, however, the system only allows for entering cards “on edge,” not easily permitting the continuous addition of spent cards that have been played to the unshuffled deck for reshuffling and therefore continuous dispensing of cards. For certain games, such as, for example, Pai Gow, it is advantageous to provide the ability to place spent cards back in the shuffler for shuffling without having to completely empty the shuffler of unshuffled cards.
Another problem with prior art shufflers of the type described above in U.S. Pat. No. 7,988,152 is that the cards drop by the force of gravity and can become snagged or stuck and not fall into place if the cards are damaged or warped. Furthermore, the slot through which unshuffled cards pass is located underneath the unshuffled cards and the unshuffled card sits on an edge and must rotate into a horizontal plane to be delivered to the dealer. This rotation adds extra time before the dealer may deal cards. In a casino environment, time efficiencies are extremely important to keep games moving and increase the number and amounts of bets placed, so the additional time to rotate the cards into a horizontal plane prior to dealing can add up.
An additional problem presented by shufflers of the prior art such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,988,152 is that the slot through which cards pass from the unshuffled stack into the shuffled stack can become jammed with one or more cards. This is because there is no mechanism by which the cards are completely delivered through the slot from the unshuffled deck to the shuffled deck. Absent such a complete delivery mechanism, there exists substantial risk of doubles making it through the slot or of the slot becoming jammed with one or more cards. Furthermore, the leading edge of the card may not always hit the center of the slot, causing impact and damage to the leading edge of the card, which also generates dust and can foul the internal mechanisms of the shuffler.
In the prior art shuffler of the kind described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,342,526 a shuffler is provided that uses one or more rollers and a pushing member which is used to “seat” unshuffled cards into a dealing rack (shuffled card rack). Each card is rolled off the bottom of the stack in a sequential order and is placed in a position in a rack which is randomly positioned to accept such card. These various types of shufflers suffer from a variety of problems related to the use of rollers and multiple moving parts and mechanisms. The rollers in general move the cards through a variety of twists and turns and, in so doing, the cards can become warped and damaged. The shufflers of these various types also involve several different sets of moving parts and mechanisms. The use of multiple moving parts and mechanisms can provide areas for breakdown in the shuffling apparatus and require repeated and constant maintenance or frequent repair. Furthermore, shufflers involving multiple moving mechanisms of this type can take up a lot of space.
Therefore, there exists a need for a mechanical shuffler that is compact and can shuffle cards on the fly in a continuous fashion so as to not substantially interrupt play. There also exists a need for a mechanical shuffler that avoids the use of ejectors, rollers, or like mechanisms which can damage the cards and generate excessive amounts of card dust that might foul the internal mechanisms of the shuffler. There also exists a need for a shuffler that completely and randomly delivers a single card at a time from an unshuffled stack to a shuffled stack and thereby avoids the problem of cards snagging to jamming in the shuffling mechanism. Finally there exists a need for a mechanical shuffler that is programmable for dealing hands specific to certain types of games wherein spent cards may be placed directly back into the machine at any time during the play to be further dealt so as to avoid delays in play.